What is your epistemology?

[theVOID]

What is knowledge? If you ignore it, it can kill you.

What?

How do we gain knowledge? Observation.

So you posit that the only way we can know something is to observe it?

How do we know what we know?

Doesn't this question ask for an uninformative tautology? We know what we know because we know it.

No, it means 'given something that is known to be true, how did we arrive at the position where we believe this to be true?'

I think a better wording is, 'How do we know something?'

Arguably the same question as, 'How do we gain knowledge?'

How do we know something would be along the lines of the TJB, knowledge is something that is true and is believed in most epistemologies, but not all. It is important to distinguish what we consider knowledge to be, can you be said to 'know' the result of a rubgy match by correctly guessing the outcome? If not then what else must we have in order to consider something knowledge?

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I'm not sure what you'd call my epistemology. I believe knowledge is anything that you can prove through logical reasoning, which is basically only 3 things: Law of Identity, Law of Excluded Middle, Law of Non-contradiction. These are the self-evident truths of logic; anything else is based on assumption somewhere down the line.

Hence my position of extreme agnosticism; I reject that knowledge exists in the sense that we can ever actually "know" anything further than logical absolutes. Truth exists in some absolute form; knowing the truth is impossible...maybe

That sure is extreme agnosticism, but it seems wildly impractical.

For instance, i know that when i press the "k" key on my keyboard the corresponding character will result, I don't have to be able to prove this logically, there is nothing necessitating that the "k" character will appear, the key could be jammed, the software in the keyboard could be send the wrong signal to the CPU etc, however I am confident in my knowledge of the result of pressing "k" because it is based on a reliable methodology that tends towards the truth.

I am therefore justified in claiming knowledge of the result of pressing "k". Absolute certainty is a triviality in this instance, because i cannot be absolutely certain that one of the two defects described above will not occur, however due to the reliability of the process resulting in "k" appearing on the screen I believe it is justified knowledge.

There is an objection of some merit to this type of explanation, known as the bootstrapping problem, however it seem to be mere semantics and does nothing for knowledge in a practical sense.

Anyhow,just as a matter of curiosity, how do you consider the logical absolutes knowable? (This may shed some light on your epistemology)

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Yep that's the one Tack

The main problem with Contructivism as far as i can tell is that it lacks a mechanism for removing false belief and simply assimilates new knowledge into the picture in a very accomodationalist way.

Motivational internalism (i assume that's what you were talking about) is a meta-ethical theory and not an epistemology, i think.

I don't believe you can completely eliminate false beliefs. Through constant input, selectivity of attention and priority processing we just focus more on the things we do believe instead of those we don't.

Yes, but the fact that we believe something does not mean that it is true or that we know it to be true.

I mean have you ever been somewhere.. utterly despise it and go back years later.. and feel a strange sense of comfort or familiarity? It's sort of like that.

I know the feeling, like the secluded holiday home that used to bore me to death when i was younger, but i don't see how this has anything to do with knowledge.

What I meant with including the internalist slant on constructivism is more of a Descarte's perspective.

Could you go a little more in-depth?

It's a very cautious approach to trusting the inputs we receive and ingesting them, while wholly recognizing the necessity for the subjectivity of the senses.

So you believe roughly that If we believe P and P is true, we have an introspective ability to justify our beliefs? How so?

While I gamble I probably have a more relaxed view of the division of conscious and subconscious than you I think we can agree that the more something passes through the thalamus the more it has an affect on our views of reality.

I don't see how any of this related to our ability to know, it could play a part in the strengthening of our beliefs for sure, but i wouldn't consider the strength of my beliefs to be a justification for believing them, regardless of whether or not they happen to be true.